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BANGLADESH / Dhaka: Chronicles of a Disaster
by Modem – Posted June 16 2014
© Modem

More than one year after the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which caused an international outcry, Bangladesh’s Commerce Minister, Tofail Ahmed, participated in a a delegation on the apparel industry on June 11th in Washington, in an attempt to appease the international opinion.

"Last week, in our budget we waived the duty on fire safety equipment, which will encourage the owners to install fire-fighting measures cost effectively,’’ explained Ahmed to WWD, following the national unrests which occurred after the Bangladeshi government refused to shut down garment factories earlier this month, that were declared as unsafe by Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, an union of international retailers, garment factory workers and NGOs (working closely with the Alliance for Bangladeshi Worker Safety).

The Commerce Minister further added that 160 new trade unions had been registered in the past year, and that "the government has taken a lot of actions in Bangladesh, perhaps more than in any other place’’, and thus emphasizing his optimistic take on the evolution of Bangladesh’s garment industry.

However, numbers don’t lie, and the thought that the Bangladeshi government might eventually control the working conditions in its garment factories is currently dismissed by The International New York Times. In fact, the newspaper reported that from Bangladesh’s roughly 5,000 garment factories employing almost 3.5 million workers, half of the factories, which are yet to be protected by either Accord or Alliance, revealed deplorable safety and working conditions after inspection.

In fact, the Rana Plaza factory collapse—a facility that produced apparel for international mass-market brands, such as H&M, Wal-Mart and Tesco—that killed 1,130 garment workers and injured more than 2,500 people, is not the first fatal accident due to a considerable lack of safety measures in Bangladesh’s garment facilities. Previous major incidents have already been registered both, in 2005 and 2012, when fires at the Tazreen Fashion and Spectrum Sweater factories killed nearly 200 people.

As of today, worker unions, NGOs and the media, have been keeping a close watch on Bangladesh’s textile and apparel industry, urging the government to put all its efforts into garment sector reforms. More on this as the story breaks.

© Modem